Sunday, March 18, 2012

Socrates (469-399 BC) - method man

Socrates was one of the few teachers who actually died for his
craft, executed by the Athenian authorities for supposedly corrupting the
young. Most learning professionals will have heard of the ‘Socratic method’ but
few will know that he never wrote a single word describing this method, fewer
still will know that the method is not what it is commonly represented to be.

How many have read the Socratic dialogues? How many know what he
meant by his method and how he practised his approach? Socrates, in fact, wrote
absolutely nothing. It was Plato and Xenophon who record his thoughts and
methods through the lens of their own beliefs. We must remember, therefore,
that Socrates is in fact a mouthpiece for the views of others. In fact the two
pictures painted of Socrates by these two commentators differ somewhat. In the
Platonic Dialogues he is witty, playful and a great philosophical theorist, in
Xenophon he is a dull moraliser.

Socratic
method

That the teacher should be an intellectual midwife to people’s own
thoughts is his great educational principle. His mother was indeed a midwife and
he was among the first to recognise that, in terms of learning, ideas are best
generated from the learner in terms of understanding and retention. Education
is not a cramming in, but a drawing out.

What is less well known is the negative side of the Socratic
method. He loved to pick intellectual fights and the method was not so much a
gentle teasing out of ideas, more the brutal exposure of falsehoods. He was
described by one of his victims as a ‘predator
which numbs its victims with an electric charge before darting in for the kill’,
even describing himself as a ‘gadfly,
stinging the sluggish horse of Athens to life’.

He was roundly ridiculed in public drama, notably by his
contemporary, Aristophanes in Clouds, where he uses the Socratic method to
explore idiotic ideas using petty, hair-splitting logic. This negative side of
Socrates is well described by Woodbridge in The Son of Apollo, ‘Flattery, cajolery, insinuation, innuendo,
sarcasm, feigned humility, personal idiosyncrasies, browbeating, insolence,
anger, changing the subject when in difficulties, faulty analogies, telling
stories which make one forget what the subject of the discussion was’. His
great joy was simply pulling people and ideas to pieces.

Socratic
philosophy of education

Beyond the famous Socratic method, he did have a philosophy of
education which included several principles:

Knowledge
and learning as a worthwhile pursuit

Learning
as a social activity pursued through dialogue

Questions
lie at the heart of learning to draw out what they already know, rather
than imposing pre-determined views

We
must realise the extent of our ignorance.

Learning
must be pursued with a ruthless intellectual honesty

In practice, these noble aims were marred by a spitefulness. He
would claim that he taught nothing as he had nothing to teach, but this
conceals his true desire to overcome and intellectually destroy his opponents.

His lasting influence is the useful idea, that for certain types
of learning, questioning and dialogue allows the learner to generate their own
ideas and conclusions, rather than be spoon-fed. This has transformed itself
into the idea of discovery learning, but there have been severe doubts
expressed about taking this method too far. We wouldn’t want our children to
discover how to cross the road by pushing them out between parked cars!

The Socratic method, although quoted widely, is often no more than
a teacher using the occasional open or inductive question. In fact, when used
crudely it can frustrate learners, especially when not combined with genuine
dialogue and feedback. To ask open questions about facts can be pointless and
result in those awful classroom sessions where the teacher asks a question,
hands shoot up and a few can answer the question. When used well, however,
especially in subjects such as philosophy and for uncovering conceptual clarity
in other subjects, it has lots to offer.

E-learning

In e-learning, Roger Schank has taken the method forward into
designs based on questions which access indexed content, especially videos. One
could also argue that search based inquiry through Google and other online
resources allows the learner to apply this questioning approach to their own
learning, Socratic learning without a Socratic teacher. Intelligent tutors and
adaptive learning systems, like Cogbooks, truly account for where the learner
has come from, where they’re going and what they need to get there.
Sophisticated e-learning is allowing us to realise the potential of a scalable Socratic
approach without the need for one-to-one teaching.

Interestingly, it is only in the last few decades, through the use of technology-based tools that allow search, questioning and now, adaptive learning, that Socratic learning can be truly realised on scale.

Conclusion

As someone who abhorred didactic, talk and chalk teaching and
learning, Socrates would be appalled at current education and training. He was not an institutional figure, practiced his teaching in the public space of the Agora and thought that experts were normally fooling themsleves by believing they had the knowledge to impart to their students. It is the unexamined life that is not worth living but not the life of certainty. .

Of course, if we were to behave like Socrates in the modern
school, college, university or training room, we’d be in front of several
tribunals for bullying, not sticking to the curriculum and failing to prepare
students for their exams. Not to mention his pederasty. (We can perhaps put
this to one side as a feature of the age!) So think again when you use the
phrase ‘Socratic method’, it’s not what it seems!

Bibliography

Plato, The Collected Dialogues of Plato, E Hamilton, Princeton.
(Highly recommend the Thaetetus as it is the key dialogue on the search for
knowledge.)

Plato, The Last Days of Socrates, Penguin Classics (trial
and condemnation)

6 Comments:

Really interesting.From reading this I suspect that Socrates was not the best model for the Socratic method!

I wrote a blog post myself earlier this year in reply to another discution that was going on. The post was about a great session on and using the Socratic Metod by Win Wegner. You can see it here.http://alanmontague.blogspot.com/2012/01/what-do-you-really-really-really-mean.html

No wonder it is useful in the courts but in everyday conversation I have often thought the Socratic method a bit pants. People who indulge in it usually seem to me to have poor self-esteem and hide behind the system but hey, that's easy to unpick but a common observation.

1) It buys you time to think without having to engage

2) It allows you to publicly dominate the conversation for the same reasons and if something is thrown up to be able to exploit weaknesses in logic and do some obvious swanking.

I find it's often used by younger people as a new toy they overuse. Again just my idiosyncratic take on it I'm sure the inconcistencies can be pulled apart ;)